Take 2 mugs of milk, with one mixed with sugar. The cat never shows special attraction to any glass because she doesn't know which has sugar and which is plain.
Most mammals including us have have taste receptors that can detect sweet, salty, sour, bitter and savory flavors. But this does not include cats(big and small - house cats, tigers and cheetahs etc), dolphins and other pure carnivores. Omnivores that chew their food have kept their sweet receptors, because detecting carbohydrates is a matter of survival. Cats exist on a high-protein meat-packed diet, with very little carbohydrate.
Researchers studying the DNA of house cats, tigers and cheetahs have settled the question: Cats both large and small harbor a genetic mutation that renders the sugar detectors on their taste buds inoperative. Independently and fairly recently, genetic mutations have made various carnivores unable to taste sweet foods. Probably because these species were already subsisting off of meat-only diets that lacked sweet flavors when the mutations first occurred, they did just fine after losing their sweet receptors -- giving rise to entire species of animals that lack appreciation for cookies or fruit.
"Nature's always tossing the dice and mutating genes all over the place, this says that losing a taste gene in an environment where nutrition doesn't depend on it doesn't matter. That loss will persist, because there's no reason for it to be eliminated."
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